The invention disclosed herein relates generally to a phoneme communication system. More specifically, the invention relates to a phoneme communication system utilizing entertaining phoneme symbols that have a one-to-one correspondence with a phoneme. The invention also relates to phonetic patch for correcting already existing orthographic codifications of English phonemes and other phonemes.
Learning to read the English language is considered a very difficult challenge, whether for children, “English as a Second Language” (ESL) students, ambassadors and other politicians, or others. This is due primarily to the complexity of the written English language attributable to the language's roots in several other tongues. The English alphabet only has twenty-six letters, however the English language contains more than twenty-six phonemes. As a result of this discrepancy, many letters or strings of letters represent one or more phonemes dependent upon usage. This gives rise to great difficulty in the phonetic decoding of individual words. Unlike Spanish and other more truly phonetic languages, English words are often not spelled as they sound. From the point of view of one learning the language, for example, standard letter string representations of actual human-pronounceable sounds (phonemes) are misleading.
Prior attempts were made to minimize these difficulties. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 4,007,548 (“Cytanovich”) discusses a method of teaching reading by presenting words in an orthography consisting of standard type having letters associated with each sound sequentially in a syllable and symbols to indicate each of the vowel sounds. Also, U.S. Pat. No. 6,604,947 (“Rai”) discusses an education method for aiding to teach and learn reading, writing and spelling. The method employs both colors and symbols. However, the prior art is deficient in many respects, including in its ability to effectively and comprehensively delineate syllables, delineate emphasis, and communicate silent phonemes, consonant phonemes, and communicate other phonemes, such as diphthong and construction phonemes, for example. Furthermore, the prior art could not be used as to phonetic patch for correcting already existing phoneme codifications (e.g. existing phoneme spellings).
Interestingly, ancient languages such as Hebrew and Arabic, recognizing the difficulty, utilized reading marks to assist with phonetic interpretation. Reading marks in languages such as Hebrew and Arabic are generally considered in two classes, vowels and diacritics. Ancient phonetic languages such as Hebrew and Arabic were written without many of the spoken vowels. After many centuries, scholars and scribes began the practice of adding vowels to supplement the consonants. This was done in the manner of superscripted and subscripted vowels above and below the consonants, thereby effectively circumventing the need to rearrange the written root characters of the word. However these reading marks did not communicate any information to the reader as to how the underlying root letter should be pronounced when positioned in varying contexts. Unlike English, these languages were primary tongues. One of the difficulties arises in English, as a result of the fact that it is a heterogeneous language, built upon the word and spellings of words from other languages.
A second class of reading marks known as diacritics also accompanies written Arabic and Hebrew text. These marks are non-unique marks that can be associated with one of several letters and indicate to the reader how much and what type of verbal emphasis should be applied to a given letter. Diacritic marks require the reader to conjugate a sound by reading the mark in conjunction with the underlying alphabetic character.